Name: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Released: 2019

Quentin Tarantino has a finished screenplay that he says he really likes, and he has decided not to make it yet. For a director who built his whole career around a countdown, a fixed number of features and then retirement, that is stranger news than the “fans will have to wait” framing suggests. The last film in the filmography is no longer the next thing he will do. It is something he will choose later.

Tarantino said it on The Graham Norton Show, his first visit to the programme in more than a decade: “I’ve written a script that I really like, but I want to do the play and see who I am; then I’ll then go back and spend time with my family and live a little and then see what I want to do.” The play is The Popinjay Cavalier, his first work for the stage, with Sacha Baron Cohen in the lead.

Tarantino has shelved a finished tenth-film script before

Most of the coverage reads the remark as a scheduling update: the tenth film exists, it is simply parked. Tarantino’s recent history argues against that reading. He had a completed script for his tenth film once already. The Movie Critic, set in 1977 and first conceived as an eight-episode series, reached pre-production with Brad Pitt cast before he walked away from it in 2024.

His explanation, given on the Church of Tarantino podcast and reported by Variety, is the key to this week’s answer. He did not drop The Movie Critic because he disliked it (“I really, really like it,” he said). He dropped it because there was nothing left to solve. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood had forced him to rebuild the Los Angeles of 1969 without CGI; the new film would have asked for the same trick again. “It was too much like the last one.”

That is an auteur’s criterion, not a producer’s. For Tarantino, the final film has to be a problem he has not yet worked out, and a script he “really likes” was not enough the last time. His wording in the Norton interview keeps the door open in the same way. He does not say he will shoot the new script. He says he will “see what I want to do.”

The Popinjay Cavalier began as a screenplay

The more revealing detail is how the play came to exist. The Popinjay Cavalier began as a screenplay until, in his words, “it really worked as a play”; he describes it as “jumping off from the swashbuckling movie genre with a French farce quality to it.” The Movie Critic had already travelled in the other direction, from television series to feature. His material no longer arrives labelled as cinema. He writes, and the form is decided afterwards.

He has also explained, with some bluntness, why the stage tempts him. Speaking at the Sundance Film Festival last year, he complained that a film now plays in theatres “for a token release” before it reaches television, while theatre remains “the final frontier”, where “you own the audience for that time.” Read next to that, “see who I am” is not a throwaway line. A filmmaker whose career is a carefully counted body of work is about to test, in a West End house, whether cinema is still the medium he trusts most.

What is known about Quentin Tarantino’s tenth film

Almost nothing. No title, premise or cast has been disclosed. World of Reel reads it as a new project rather than a revival of The Movie Critic, although Tarantino has said he could return to that script because it is already written. His ninth and most recent feature, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, came out in 2019. The gap since then is already the longest of his career, longer than the six years that followed Jackie Brown. In the meantime he wrote the Netflix sequel built around Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth, with David Fincher directing.

The Popinjay Cavalier opens at London’s Phoenix Theatre in March, after previews in late February, for a three-month run that closes on June 13. The family in his sentence is concrete: Tarantino and his wife, Daniella Pick, have two children and a third on the way.

So the tenth Tarantino film now waits on the verdict of a London audience. A play he first wrote as a screenplay will decide whether the screenplay he wrote next ever becomes a film.

Tags: Quentin Tarantino, Sacha Baron Cohen, film directors, The Popinjay Cavalier, The Graham Norton Show, The Movie Critic